Portal:Literature/Biography archive/2007, Week 50

Melvil Dewey (December 10, 1851–December 26, 1931) was the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system for library classification.

Dewey was born Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey in Adams Center, New York in the United States. He attended Amherst College, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. He graduated in 1874 with a bachelor's degree and received a master's degree from Amherst in 1877. It was while working as an assistant librarian at Amherst from 1874 until 1877 that Dewey devised his system of classifying and cataloguing books by decimal numbers.